Thursday 28th August 1986
Qualifying Cross Country
Thursday 28th August 1986, I am 17 and my mum and I live in a first-floor rented flat in a block on the edge of St Annes, our next door neighbour is an electricity substation. She works as a waitress in a hotel, starting breakfast shifts at six in the morning and sometimes not getting home until midnight or even later. Yet still, somehow, she managed to give me the money to finish my Private Pilot’s Licence and today I did. I flew Piper PA-28 Cherokee G-BASL of Air Navigation and Trading at Blackpool Airport to Barrow-in-Furness and then to Carlisle before bringing it back to Blackpool. My qualifying cross-country.
Yesterday I flew from Blackpool to Carlisle and back with a chain-smoking instructor, today I flew the route myself and landed in Barrow-in-Furness, too. Just as I was leaving the clubhouse to walk out to the aeroplane, the club’s owner, Keith, caught up with me and said:
“You’ve never flown a Cherokee solo before, have you?”
“No,” I admitted, scared that he was going to stop me flying the last flight for my licence.
“Well, do one circuit and come back. If it feels okay, do a touch and go and head off on your cross country.”
I was out of the door before he had the chance to change his mind. I did my checks, started up and taxied out. Today the smaller cross runway was in use, rather than the long runway that headed straight out to sea. The runway was the furthest that you could taxy at the airport without going through a fence and onto a golf course. It’s the St Annes Old Links golf course at the edge of Blackpool Airport. In fact, Blackpool Airport is actually in the parish of St Annes as is a bit of what is generally thought of as Blackpool, including Pontin’s holiday camp. The parish is, I believe, actually called St Anne, Heyhouses on Sea but nobody ever calls it that.
Anyway, sat at the end of Runway 31, I didn’t care, I was off on my qualifying cross-country flight. First, though, a circuit. Off over the houses, into the parish of Blackpool, turn right, right again and back into St Annes, do my downwind checks and turn right two more times to line up with the runway, all looks good. Put down the flaps for landing. Coming down, coming down, round out, hold it off, hold it off, a squeak from the stall warner then a squeak from the wheels. A beautiful landing. Open the throttle and off again, off on my flight first to Barrow-in-Furness.
Hang on, though, the aeroplane’s not climbing.
I’m at the right speed but it’s not going up. Those houses are getting ever so close. Shit, they look big. Aircraft crashes into house on Westgate Road, Blackpool (which is actually in St Annes) the headline might read. What the fuck is wrong. I’ve got full power, the engine’s working fine, I’ve got take-off flap selected. Ah, no. No I haven’t, I’ve got full flap selected. Oops. Retract that stage of flap and, miraculously, the inter-war semis of Westgate Road are saved. I’m off.
I climb over the first tram stop in Blackpool and out to sea, past the piers and the tower, heading north. Barrow-in-Furness could not be easier to find: north up the coast, across Morecambe Bay. I throw my chart down onto the empty seat next to me, I won’t be needing that. It’s a beautiful day and I can see the other side of Morecambe Bay all the way from Blackpool. It’s like somebody took a great big bite out of western England leaving a huge gaping mouth of sea.
It’s about ten miles over the water but it doesn’t seem that far, it looks like I could glide to land at any time if the engine suddenly went quiet. I hope so, lifejackets were not an option today. I think it’s an illusion though because that land the other side crawls nearer when you expect it to rush. Halfway across the bay, the fells of the Lake District clearly visible to the northeast, I reckon it’s probably time to call the airfield at Barrow Walney Island.
“Walney Tower, good afternoon, G-BASL inbound to you.”
“G-SL, good afternoon. Pass your message.”
“G-SL is a PA28 from Blackpool to Walney Island currently Morecambe Bay, two thousand five hundred feet request join.”
“G-SL Runway in use is three-five, left-hand circuit, QFE one zero, two, zero. Report Heeyelpsverd Point.”
“Wilco, G-SL.” Report where now? Where the hell is Heeyelpsverd Point? Is that even what he said? Where’s that chart?
There’s no sign of the chart, I had put it on the seat but it’s not there now. Where the hell has that gone? I look around, it’s not on the floor in front of the seat.
I then look in the back and there it is, in the furthest corner, it’s slipped from the front seat, into the back. I stretch across but can’t get my hand down between the seat and the fuselage. I try stretching behind the seat but it’s just out of my grasp. I’m going to have to get it.
I take off the seat belt and ease myself between the seats , I grab the chart and clamber back into position. The aircraft has just trundled on despite my stupidity and, looking at the chart, I now see Hilpsford Point, it’s just on the nose, the southernmost extremity of a crescent moon of green and brown sat apart from the mainland. The airfield is on a narrow island called Walney Island, opposite the town and connected only by a bridge to the mainland
“G-SL at Hilpsford Point.”
“G-SL, roger. Join straight in for runway three-five, report final.”
I didn’t even have to turn, just fly straight at the thousand yards of asphalt and land. On the way in it is sand and pale fields and a caravan park. As I approach, I fly over Vickerstown, named after the Vickers shipbuilding and engineering company responsible for its creation. The first thousand houses were completed by 1901 for workers in the Barrow-in-Furness shipyard. However, the company didn’t build a bridge to the mainland until 1908. It’s supposed to be a place of very individual character but to me it looks like the island where pebbledash came to die. The runway lies straight ahead of me.
Runways are numbered due to their magnetic bearing; so, for instance, if the runway points to 353 degrees on the compass, it would be rounded down to 350 degrees and the last zero dropped, therefore it would be runway three-five. The same runway, in the opposite direction, is runway one-seven as, being straight, it must point to 173 degrees. The main runway at an airport has generally been set out to take advantage of prevailing winds as aeroplanes and their pilots prefer taking off and landing into wind.
“G-SL, final three five.” I called.
“G-SL, cleared to land runway three five.”
I float a little way and then the wheels are down, I lower the nose and I have arrived for the very first time solo at an airport other than the one I took off from. I am now a pilot. There’s one taxiway at Walney Island but it goes all the way around the outside of the three runways which are arranged in a triangle. I could taxy to the end of the runway and take the taxiway but it’s about seventy-three times quicker to just turn around and backtrack on the runway to the control tower where I pay my landing fee.
Then it’s off again to Carlisle. I would have liked to fly direct, right over the Lake District: Grizedale, Coniston, Hawkshead, Rydal, Patterdale, Dacre, Greystoke, there’s a lyrical quality to the names but they sound as solid as the fells; like poems carved into granite or written on slate. That’s not the way that I’ve been cleared to fly by the flying school, though. I have been told to fly up the coast to Whitehaven then turn right for Carlisle. I suppose it’s easier to follow with less chance of me flying into anything like an inconveniently placed mountain.
So, I take off heading north already and over Duddon Sands, the wide mouth of, not unexpectedly, the River Duddon with the looming sleeping dinosaur of Black Combe sitting the other side of the water. Past the disused airfield of RAF Millom, a World War Two training base and now a prison, HMP Haverigg. The old runways are still visible as are all of the blocks and the huge wall and fence surrounding the prison. Amazing to think of all those people with their liberty taken away because of choices they made and me up here, literally as free as a bird, the whole sky my playground, well, as long as I stick to the route my instructor set out. That route has to be the easiest ever as I just have to follow the coast and, as long as the green bits are to my right, I am on the correct track. I pass the small village of Ravenglass, guarding the mouth of the River Mite as it did when the Romans were garrisoned here. Then it’s on to Sellafield.
Five years ago Sellafield was called Windscale and that’s still the name I think of, it’s the site of the world’s first nuclear power station providing electricity to the grid and also the site of one of the world’s worst nuclear incidents when, in 1957, there was an accident which was scored as a 5 on the International Nuclear Event Scale; the scale only goes up to 7. This was second only to a major accident at Kyshtym in Russia which also happened in 1957; at least it was until April this year when the Chernobyl disaster happened.
We’ve been told not to eat Cumbrian lamb because of radioactivity from Chernobyl. The Cumbrian fells here are 1,400 miles from Chernobyl; we are clearly still too stupid to have nuclear power. And think about the world in 1957. Movies were black and white, everybody wore hats, cars still had little flags that popped out the side as indicators. What on earth were we thinking about fucking around with nuclear power?
Nuclear operations began here at Windscale, or Sellafield, or whatever they want to call it, a decade before the accident; initially producing plutonium-239 for nuclear weapons. It’s still a power station but also reprocesses uranium and plutonium from the reactors here and those elsewhere in the country. Spent nuclear fuel creates such radioactive by-products such as uranium-234 with a half-life 245 thousand years and neptunium-237 with a half-life of 2.144 million years; which sounds like a great plan.
The very first early hominids, Homo erectus, left Africa to colonise the globe around 2 million years ago; in the same time again the neptunium-237 we’ve created will be half as radioactive as it is today. Now, I’m no nuclear physicist but, on the face of it, that doesn’t sound like a brilliant idea to me. We’d have been better of if Homo had never bothered becoming erectus at all.
My chart tells me to stay a couple of miles away from or 2,200 feet above Sellafield; I do both. It’s a great ugly, brutal city of a place that seems to have captured and enslaved the River Calder. Still, this is the only part of Britain where you can read at night by the light of a sheep.
The coast continues roughly northwards until it gets to St Bees Head where it turns right. I do the same to go past the towns of Whitehaven and Workington. Whitehaven grew up as a port exporting coal in the seventeenth century and was the second busiest port in England, after London, by the middle of the eighteenth. However, just about anywhere that you can tie up a boat claims to have been the second busiest port in England at some point in its history. Whitehaven has long been a mining town, it was built on coal but, unfortunately, rather more figuratively than literally. There were not huge, economically retrievable deposits of coal beneath the miners’ feet but there were huge reserves beneath the waves. It seems this coast has powered the nation for a long time.
The last mine here, the Haig Mine, started operations during the First World War, hence the name. All of the workings spread west from here, eventually reaching out over four miles under the Irish Sea. It closed in March of this year and three and a half thousand people lost their jobs. Workington was a mining town, too, but was better known for the production of iron and steel. Today they build all of the Leyland buses that you see all over the country in every town and city.
The land immediately north of here, across the water, is Scotland; the next land to the west is Ballyhalbert in County Down, Northern Ireland. The whole of the Lake District still sits to my right as it has done the whole way through this trip and as I pass Bassenthwaite Lake, looking down the valley between Skiddaw and Broom Fell towards Keswick, a flight of four Royal Air Force C-130 Hercules transport aircraft emerge at low level and fly underneath me. We’re sharing the same sky, I am really a pilot now. A pilot heading for the airport at Carlisle; well, actually, five miles beyond Carlisle. I flew past the city and its castle, on the site of the Roman fort of Luguvalium.
The airport has another huge length of tarmac for me to land on and it’s a pretty good landing before I taxy in and park next to the control tower. I am about as happy as I have ever been as I jump down of the wing in the August sunshine. I have completed my solo qualifying cross country and just have to head back to Blackpool after this. I have done everything that I need to do for my licence, I am now a pilot, I am definitely going to do this every single day that I can from now on.
I was there with you, reaching for the chart 😅🤣. Nice one!
Another excellent 10 minute read!